Charles Schulz - Peanuts Creator, Comic Strip Legend

Good Grief! Today, we're talking about a man whose creations are so ingrained in our culture, you probably think he was born with a beagle on his head and a football perpetually being pulled away.

In this episode of Dirt Nap City, we're diving into the wonderfully neurotic, surprisingly profound, and undeniably complex world of Charles M. Schulz, the artistic mastermind behind Peanuts! Forget your grand pronouncements and epic battles, because Schulz gave us something far more enduring: a bald kid who never wins, a dog with an identity crisis, and a psychiatrist who charges five cents.

But how did a quiet kid from Minnesota, nicknamed "Sparky," become the philosophical voice of generations? We'll journey back to the early days, when Peanuts wasn't even Peanuts! (Prepare for some seriously un-catchy original titles, folks.) Discover the surprising influences that shaped Schulz's unique brand of humor, from the little red haired girl that he had a crush on, to a real-life dog named Spike who might have been the original Snoopy. Snoopy's antics often defied gravity and common sense – much like our own lives! We'll unpack the moments that propelled Peanuts from a modest comic strip to a global phenomenon, spawning TV specials, Broadway shows, and enough merchandise to fill a thousand doghouses.

We'll also chuckle at the often-overlooked absurdity of the Peanuts universe: Lucy's perpetual bossiness, Linus's unwavering devotion to his security blanket (and the sheer bravery of anyone who tried to take it), and Charlie Brown's relentless pursuit of happiness, often just missing it by a hair.

So don't be a blockhead, grab your security blanket and join Alex and Kelly as we celebrate the genius of Charles M. Schulz and the enduring, often hilarious, legacy of Peanuts. Good grief, you won't want to miss it!

Transcript

Unknown: 0:07

Hello. That was great, was it? Yeah? I like the fact that you backed away from the mic as you got louder. That's real professional, now, yeah, for the amateur, you know, blowing out your your ears. Is that what they call it in the business, red lining. It, yeah, yeah, peaking. It's peaking, like hitting up at the highest levels. Sure the red, hitting the red hurts. That hurts. Bu, Vu, volume units, what are ohms? That's, that's an electrical thing. Okay, volume, volume units, yeah, your VU meter. It's called a VU meter. And if it's, if it's in the red, then it starts to get a little crackly. You want to be around minus six, minus, okay. Well, welcome to another episode of dirt nav city. My name is Alex. I'm here with my friend Kelly. How you doing? Kelly? I'm doing well. I'm doing well. I'm glad that we're here doing this today. I decided to get a little dressed up for you. And, you know, put myself in my podcasting place. Yeah? Like, yeah. Thanks. Thanks for the dress. Dressing up. Got a nice suit. Yeah? Tie today. See another, another look like our award show with our 100 best. Yeah, now that I'm looking closer, that is a T shirt that looks like a suit, right, with the sleeves cut off the use, Yeah, huge. You know, this is a podcast about interesting, dead people, that's right. And we're well past our 100 episodes, and we're, we're getting to the, we're still on famous people, though. You know, it's, it's gonna be a while before we get to the non famous people. I think, right, right? And I think that's, that's a natural evolution, right? People want to hear about just average Joes. That's, that's, we'll have to change the tagline, probably sure, you know, like I said, we'll get to everyone eventually, just, you know, wait your turn. But we're gonna concentrate on some famous folks for now. There's a lot of dead people. There are a lot of dead people, and more and more added every day. That's the beauty of it. Wow. Never thought, never thought about it that way, that it's that people dying is just more content for us. Yeah, exactly. We're just we're all about the content. If it takes people dying to get it, then that's so be it. Well, I'm going to talk about somebody today who is exactly in our wheelhouse, kind of surprised we haven't done him yet. Okay, white guy from the 20th century icon. Not that we're restricting ourselves to to white guys, it's but you know, you do what you know best, and we're a couple old white guys, so it would be only natural that we we lean that way. But this guy's an icon, okay, born in 1922 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, okay, died in 2000 in Santa Rosa, California. Santa Rosa. Santa. Is that near Los Angeles? Think so. Yeah. Okay, I think so. And Make Him 78 years old when he died, yeah. Okay, yeah. And right now is the 75th anniversary of his, his the work that he's known for the most, hmm, 75 years of the work. You mean specifically his work, or just that type of work? Yeah, his, his, his invention, or his work, his, I don't know. It's not an invention. Was he an artist? Yes, okay, but sure, an artist, yes, okay. I mean, loosely defined. I mean you, you wouldn't probably see his stuff primarily in galleries, although there's probably galleries that have his stuff more commercially available. I guarantee you've held several of his drawings in your hand. I've held his. Oh, okay, okay. Did he draw on money or something like that? Or draw not money, but drew on newspapers. Mm, hmm, yeah, so was it a cartoon? Is it Charles Schultz, you got it, man, hey, good one, yeah, he he didn't go by Charles or Charlie. He went by Chuck. He went by Sparky. Sparky. Charles Schultz, aka. Sparky. He was an only child, and his nickname was Sparky, okay, and his uncle gave him that name after a comic strip. There was a comic strip with a horse, and the horse's name was spark plug strip. The Comic Strip was called Barney Google. Barney Google, all right, have you ever heard of Barney Google? No, I've. I've heard of those things individually, but not together as one thing. Apparently, Barney Google was really, really popular, okay, back in, back in the day, back in the, you know, 1920s and that comic still exists. Um, although you it's it kind of one of the lesser characters have taken over. Now, in this comic strip, the lesser character's name is Snuffy Smith. Snuffy Smith, no, huh? No, no. Well, the comic is still running. It's been running for 100 years now, since 1919 Snuffy Smith is the main character now, but that only makes it the third longest running comic. There's two comics that have been running longer than this Snuffy Smith, wow, and they sound when you say them, it's like, Yeah, I've heard of that, but I'm not a really big comic guy. The cats and jammer kids. Never heard of that one, really. Jammer kids, okay, so, like The Little Rascals kind of thing. I mean, it's a comic strip so and gasoline alley, your gasoline? Yes, I've seen that one that that's been around forever, but Barney Google was so popular that that they say he was the inspiration. That character was the inspiration for the number Google, which just the the really big, like the biggest number that you can 100 zeros after it is what a Google is. And a Google was the inspiration for the company Google. So in a way, Barney Google was the inspiration was the forerunner to the company we known as Google right now. Okay, Barney Google, so Charles Schultz will call him Sparky from here on out, because he really hated his name. He never really answered to Charles or chuck or or Charlie or anything. No derivatives of Charles. No, no. In fact, Charlie Brown wasn't even named after him. It wasn't named after his one of his friends. He grew up telling people he was going to be a famous cartoonist one day. But he wasn't. He didn't have any he wasn't arrogant or cocky. He just was really focused. So he he, you know, just just had a hunch that if he just kept at it that he would be famous someday. He was a smart kid. He skipped two and a half grades. That's, that's a lot. That is, how do you skip half a grade? That's, that's a weird one. I could see two or three, but two and a half, I guess maybe you finish the first semester, and then you just skip right to the next grade. Okay, wow. Christmas time or something. But when he was younger, he drew a picture of his dog. His dog's name was spike, if you remember, Snoopy. Was it his alter ego? Yeah, I guess his friend or something, was named spike. I I mean, I know he pretended to be the Red Baron a lot. That's a good question. I don't remember another dog named spike. Yeah, yeah. Anyways, he drew a picture of his dog who kind of looked like Snoopy, although he wasn't the same. He was a pointer, not a beagle, but he sent it to Ripley's, believe it or not, and I guess they used to have comics, strips, or books or something, and Ripley's published it and said, This is a hunting dog that eats pins, tacks and razor blades. Is owned by CF Schultz, st, Paul, Minnesota, and drawn by Sparky. Oh, wow. Kind of his first publication. Wow. When he created Snoopy, he wanted to call it sniffy. Yeah, that's not as good. Well, someone else had used sniffy, so he had to use a second choice called Snoopy. But yeah, I feel like sniffy wouldn't have made it like sniffy. Sniffy sounds like sort of, I'm just reminded of tissues immediately, you know. And again, his the, you know, if his favorite comic was Snuffy Smith. Sniffy is a little too close to Snuffy, right, right. And again, it sounds sick. It does. Snoopy is a good name, though it is, it is. I've often wondered if Snoop Dogg was inspired by Snoopy. Well, it was he. Snoop Dogg was named that way because his because of the way it looked when he was growing up. So they, yeah, they, it's, I think his family named him Snoop, okay, Calvin. Calvin brought us, but he's not dead, so we can't talk about him, right, right? You know, sparkies, you. High school yearbook rejected his drawings, really, which he was probably going to give them for free? Yeah, of course. Now they have, like, a big statue, like a five foot tall statue of Snoopy in the lobby of the high school, sure, sure. But at the time, they rejected his drawings, and that's kind of a theme of this guy, you know, the thing I want to talk about when and just think about when you when you think about Sparky Schultz is just kind of how before people talked openly about anxieties and insecurities and and those things that we carry with us. He was out there with his characters, kind of showing things like insecurity, and he had a lot of them. He had a lot of neuroses. But that was, you know, that was one of his first big setbacks, was when his high school wouldn't even publish his drawings. And he kind of took these things and internalized them and brought him out in his in his work. So he worked at a place called Art instruction, Inc, and he didn't work there long, but a lot of his friends and co workers there became inspirations for his characters along the way. Then World War Two broke out, kind of towards the end of the war, he was drafted in the army, and he was a squad leader on a machine gun team in Europe. Wow, but he wasn't very good at it. He would tell you, he wasn't very good at it. He only had one opportunity to fire the machine guns, and he forgot to load the machine gun. It was a German soldier standing there, and luckily for him, the soldier surrendered before he realized that he forgot. And you know, you know what he probably said. Probably said, Good grief. There you go. There you go. And Good grief, another example of, like, just kind of showing your neuroses, right? Sparky, you block head. Sparky was kind of a blockhead when it came to fighting. So when he came home from the war, he published his cartoons in a book, an anti communist comic book. I remember this is, you know, the mid 40s, and the book was called, is this tomorrow? And there was a panel. It was a one panel, single panel strip, kind of like Family Circus, right? Yeah, you have some one fan one panel strips. You got one, one chance to be funny, yeah? And the joke, the one panel jokes, and the comic strip was called Low folks, l, I, L, of course. Okay, little folks. Little folks and, and that was kind of the beginning of the what was later known as as peanuts. A lot of the characters were the same, or at least Charlie Brown was introduced. There was a dog that looked like Snoopy. Was called rover. Okay, talked about Beethoven a lot, yeah, yeah. But the prime, the primary thing that was the same was, it was kids saying things that were kind of above their years, or things that adults might say, right? And I think that's the, the main takeaway from the from the Peanuts comic strip, when you think about it, it was kids saying things that kids wouldn't say, you know, using big words and talking about, you know, things that adults kind of and this was little folks, little folks, little folks, little folks. Okay, he got paid 10 bucks per submission. Charlie Brown was introduced as a character in 1948 Okay, and named after a coworker of his art instruction place named Charlie Brown. That comic ran from he took it out of the from the that is this tomorrow magazine to the st, his hometown paper, the St Paul para new press, and ran from 1947 to 1950 and then he shopped it around and went to work for United Feature Syndicate. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You see that at the Yeah. You see that at the bottom of those strips all the time. That was in 1950 but because he was, he was moving it for legal reasons, they had to change the name Little they couldn't use little folks anymore. The St Paul paper owned it, so the United Feature Syndicate changed the name to peanuts, which he didn't really, Sparky didn't have a say in at all. Yeah, he hated the name. I kind of, I mean, it seems to match, because we're used to it. It's what we grew up with, right? But I never call it peanuts, yeah, yeah, I don't think anybody does. People call it Charlie Brown. People call it Snoopy, yeah. I think his hunch was right. Nobody calls it peanuts, really. It's like the official name. But, you know. Might say, Who's your favorite peanuts character? But then people go, what's peanuts? Yeah, he hated it. He said it sounded trivial. Or he said, I don't want people to think this is about food. And also, he wanted to get paid more than that, right? I mean, when they say they're going to pay you in peanuts, that's usually means you're not getting paid very well. And boy, did he get paid well eventually, at its apex, peanuts was published daily in 2600 newspapers in 75 countries, wow, in 21 different languages. And in the 50 years that he drew it, he drew almost 18,000 published strips, producing a billion dollars in revenue a year. A year. He a year. Wow, he was taken in like 30 to 40 million a year, which sounds like a small percentage of a billion, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. But I guess that billion was spread out across all those different three to 4% goes to him. Wow, that's amazing. Doesn't seem Yeah. He only took one vacation in his 50 years for his 75th birthday in 1997 he took a five week break, and the papers ran like reruns, basically, like a best of Yeah, thing, yeah. That was the only, only vacation he ever took in his life. So So is peanut still published today. They showed they in a lot of papers. They should they put, well, papers aren't doing that great anymore, but yeah, they put the old ones on there. But there's as new ones. They're not no, in fact, as a condition he put in his, I guess he put it in his will. He said, nobody can draw this once I'm gone, nobody, nobody can take it over. I own this, taking it to the grave with me, what in terms of comic strips? Now, since he never considered the other media, like movies and TV specials, the same as comic strips. So they are making new ones. I think there's a new one coming on Apple TV called something about the Franklin. Remember Franklin? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember Franklin. He was representative character in the in the otherwise mostly white group. Yeah. So Franklin was introduced right after, like weeks after MLK was assassinated. Okay, so he introduces this African American character, but, um, never did much with him there. He's never the he was never the sender of any story, he was just kind of there. So, you know, this, the Sparky was, you know, he was ahead of the curve. He was, I guess you could say he was progressive on some of the things. But this is, you know, slow progression through a white Midwesterners point of a lens, yeah. So, like, you've got Franklin, but you're not doing anything with them. And there's a famous cell, I guess, which call those pictures, right? When we talked about some of these other things, we talked about how those are called cells, right? Yeah, yeah. And there's a famous one of, like, all the kids in the lunchroom, and Franklin sitting at a table by himself, wow, and that was just drawn that way. That was, I don't think it was Sparky. I don't know. I don't think Sparky was trying to say it should be that way. Maybe he was saying it is that way, or maybe he was just drawing, who knows, he never really addressed those kind of things. Gotcha, but it was out there, and he was critic. Well, he's criticized now for that kind of thing, but maybe he was trying to make a commentary. Like, if you notice this, then you should do something about this or something. But he drew that cell, he drew that frame, yeah, but he didn't like draw it as, uh, as a standalone, like it wasn't a one strip thing. Part of that would be some other it was part of some other longer cartoon. And people just had that one and said, Look at this segregation going on now. Man, if you could, if that had been a single cell comic strip, that would have almost been like a political cartoon, yeah, yeah. You just draw a single cell of a bunch of kids at a but, but it wasn't like you said, so those kind of things he was ahead of the curve on. I mean, there wasn't any other comics that even had African American characters. So in a way, he was ahead of the curve. But like I say, he didn't do anything with it. Right now, there's a special coming out in 2025 about Franklin. It took, you know, 75 years to for him to get his own special but, but, yeah, that's part of the legacy, you know. So, so now they are also met life, right? The Peanuts are sort of the mascot like that life. Yeah? Licensed as, yeah, MetLife, are they them? And also, I think Six Flags also has, like, Camp Snoopy, Oh, really. They started off at Knott's Berry Farm, okay? And now I think Six Flags has them, and they have the Bugs Bunny characters, and they're allowed to run around in mascot custom. So all that stuff is licensed. They just nobody can draw new comic strips. So did you? Did you watch the the seasonal or holiday specials that would come out? You know, I watched the two, the two big ones, the Charlie Brown Christmas and the Great was great pumpkin, yeah. And the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown Christmas actually came out in 1965 Wow. And, you know, that's the kind of thing. You don't even it's always around. You don't know when it came out. You might have thought it came out later than that. Yeah, it was, it was just always there. And in the days before, video on demand when you had to actually catch it at a time that was going to play. I can remember as a kid hearing, you know, watching NBC or whatever in Houston, and it would say, Oh, this Thursday, we're going to play the Charlie Brown Christmas special. And we would make an appointment, you know, we would, we would time to watch it. Oh, yeah, for sure. Let's talk about some of the characters. You remember the little red haired girl? Yeah, yeah, that was who Charlie Brown had a crush on. He had a crush on her, and it was kind of unrequited, right? Like she didn't know he existed, right? And like him back, that's based on a real life person, and it was a really big moment in his life. I mean, a big thing that she was a coworker of his at that at that art school, art school, she was an accountant, actually, and he got up enough nerve to ask her to marry him, and she turned him down. Oh, well, wait, wait, wait, so, so he asked her, asked her to marry him, but that seems like skipping over a lot, like, how about let's go out for coffee first, right? In fact, he was so clueless about it. The reason she turned him down is she was already engaged to somebody else, and he didn't know it. No, he didn't know it. Wow. Now that's a blockhead move, right? That is a block Wow. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can see, like, the direct line between him and those characters, like he's so brilliant that he skips two and a half grades, but not enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's so weird. On Valentine's Day in 2011 the Charles Schultz Museum in Minneapolis gave free admission to all redheads, nice, but apparently this was a really big moment, like he said, that was the only I mean, he's wary twice, and he still talked about this lady as the only true love he ever had and and that he was the worst day of his life when she turned him down like it was the the one that got away, or whatever, the real lady, you know, poor thing she had to live with this once he kind of outed her as the lady she kind of had to always apologize for. Do you have her name? Do you have her name? Her name was, I do is she's still alive? She she died? And did she die of a broken heart? Is the question. She wasn't into him well before, before, he was, uh, famous and rich. She wasn't but, but after, after, she was no gold digger or anything. No, all right, no, she, um, her name was Donna Mae Johnson, Donna Donna may with the hyphen. No, no, three and three words, she actually, she actually died in 2016 but there's some people that say that they were romantically involved and they dated for three years. But if that's the case, then how do you how is she engaged to somebody else? I don't, I don't really understand it. Yeah, I don't really get that part. Maybe it's better we just leave that a mystery, yeah, but, but this Donna may Johnson, like I said, kind of outed who she was. So she was kind of a, a public person, in a way, for for a while. Isn't that kind of weird? Yeah, yeah, to be, to be well, especially for that, right? That's that's just a really weird thing to be known for. Well, they remain friends for the rest of his life. And he said, I can think of no more emotionally damaging loss than to be turned down by someone who you love very much, a person who not only turns you down, but almost immediately will marry the. Victor. What a bitter blow. That is, like, that's crazy, right? Yeah. I mean, you're hearing one side of it there, right? You're just hearing, you're just hearing this, his butt hurt side, yeah? Maybe, like I said, they were friends his whole life, you know, they, you know, she was small town Minnesota girl, yeah, I wonder if her husband, the guy that he actually did, she actually did marry. I wonder if he was like, Please don't talk to me about peanuts. I'm done with that, right, right? I would be if I was him, you wouldn't want to talk about it, or would you want to talk about it maybe once and then and but not like, bring it up at every party we go to or be known for it. You know, somebody said, tell us a fun fact about yourself. Be like, you know, I married the little redheaded girl, right, right? I My, my wife was the one who broke Charles Schultz's or Sparky heart. My wife chose me over a billionaire, yeah, yeah, yeah, he Linus. Remember Linus? Yeah, with a blanket, yeah. Linus was named after his Sparky, his best friend, okay? And they were friends his whole life. They were friends even, even in his later years, they would go out for coffee like every day. You know, Linus. Linus was another fellow cartoonist. I think at that art institute, he ended up being a political cartoonist in the in the comic. Do you remember what Linus? His last name is, Linus and Lucy Van Pelt, yeah. You got it, yeah. All right, you're real. You're a real fan. I don't know why I remember that, but Linus Van Pelt, Lucy Van Pelt, Peppermint Patty. Yeah, so, so funny thing I just a couple of days ago, for some reason, had searched for something online, and I came up with peppermint patty and and Peppermint Patty was kind of ahead of her time in the whole gender thing, right? The the they them, Peppermint Patty probably would have been a they them, right? I don't think so. No, I don't think so. No, well, well, because, because Marcy called, called Peppermint Patty, sir, did? She did, yeah, and, and there was kind of a weird dynamic there. I don't know if weird is not the right word, but there was a dynamic between them. Yeah, it was like Marcy was in love with peppermint patty, but Peppermint Patty was oblivious. Peppermint Patty was in was in love with Charlie Brown, right? So Peppermint Patty was introduced in 1966 so she's not in Charlie Brown Christmas that came out the year before. Oh, okay, um, that was inspired by his favorite cousin, who happened to have peppermint candies in her house, and she lived in, I think, California, the candy Peppermint Patty had been out for 25 years already, but those were only on the East Coast, so he didn't name it after pep think it's a coincidence. Didn't name it, he wouldn't have known about the candy, and the candy definitely wasn't named after the character because it had already been out. But I think it was a coincidence. You're talking about the York Peppermint Patty? Yeah, right. When I bite into a York Peppermint Patty, I get the sensation of, remember those commercials? Yeah. They have nothing to do with the do you do? You know, this is a real, real deep cut. Do you know what Peppermint Patty's real name was in the character name, I don't Patricia, Reichardt. Patricia, and that was actually his secretary's last name was Reichardt. He used a lot of the people around him, okay, um, her roommate. His secretary's roommate was the model. Was the model for Marcy. She looked just like Marcy. Marcy had glasses, right? And the running gag early on, for like 10 years, the running gag was that Peppermint Patty didn't know that Snoopy was a dog. She thought he was just a funny looking kid with a big nose. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that. I remember that she would just say stuff like, yeah, you can be on my team, or Yeah. She would just talk to him like he was a kid. And even, like, there was some, there was a plot where Snoopy went to obedience school and she thought he was, like, at a school for gifted children or something she's never, never got okay. And peppermint Hattie also was known for, she got a D minus on every school assignment or exam, just scraping by right? And there was one episode or a instance where her teacher gave her admittance into the D minus Hall of Fame. Okay, I don't remember so, you know. So going back to what you're saying before pepper and Patty, she shows up in the 60s. She's got sandals. She's got, if you watch the cartoon, she's got a deep voice. She got a best friend who calls her sir. The LGBT community really took that as what they call queer coding. Or, you know, examples of somebody being a part of the community without saying that, right, okay? He never commented one way or they he knew about it. He never confirmed or denied it, and that was kind of how he was. He did his characters. Didn't have to explain themselves. He wasn't running away from it, but he wasn't running towards it either. He was just kind of, it was out there. Just was what it was. Yeah, like, I say the a lot of people. There's been, you know, probably dissertations written about how pepper patty is a member of the gay community and and all the reasons why. Basically, he drew her as a tomboy who, like you said, was called Sir, right? The idea, though, that a woman calling a woman sir and the 60s was pretty revolutionary, just the idea that you could get away with something like that. And again, these are children, and by making them children, it's maybe you can introduce some themes like that, if you want to, without being so threatening, right. Right disarms people. Again. He never really talked about this kind of stuff. So was he a revolutionary progressive, or was he just kind of inadvertently commenting on this stuff? I don't know. He considered Jim Davis his biggest rival in the game. You know, Jim Davis is, yeah, yeah. Hold on. Jim Davis drew, I know Bill Keen was Family Circus, yeah. Who is Jim Davis, the Garfield guy? Garfield, that's it. Thank you. He was a little jealous. He was his mentor. He was, he was Jim Davis's mentor. But he was also a little jealous when Garfield, like in the 80s, when Garfield kind of made it big and was out earning peanuts, you know, little comic book rivalry, yeah. But they, like I said, they were comic strip right, mentors and friends and all that kind of stuff. But, but yeah, so when he died in 2000 there was more than 100 comics that day that made references to the to peanuts, oh yeah. All the other, all the other comic strips made a reference to Sparky, yeah. And there's a website that I was looking at today that has where you could just click on it and see the strip for that day. And everyone from BC to funky winker bean to Family Circus to, you know, Dilbert beetle, Bailey and all these, it was crazy. They would just make little references to it, even, yeah, BC or Haggar, the horrible even, yeah, oh yeah. Hagar, the horse dressed up, was dressed up in, like Charlie Brown, he said, he came out. Remember those were Vikings? Yeah, right. He had the horns on his head. So in that one he's he came out. And he said, What do you think of my new look? And he had, like, Charlie Brown's shirt with the the yellow and, you know, the stripes. And then the other Vikings said, Good grief, Oh, wow. This stuff's not hilarious. Most of it's not even funny. A lot of it's just sort of like, Huh, you know, you just kind of like, Huh? I know that's the thing. That's the thing I always think about these comic strips is they're not they're humorous, I suppose, in the broadest sense of the word. I was never a really big like funny papers guy, you know? Well, I think the thing is, you become invested in the characters. If you read it every day or every Sunday or whatever, you'd become invested in the characters. And then it didn't have to be funny. It just was kind of like, you knew what their tropes were. You knew what they were possibly going to do, and then you saw what they did. Do, you know, I was like, Oh yeah, I didn't expect that, or I did expect that, right? Yeah, there were, there were several comics that I read pretty regularly. My grandparents got me a sort of anthology of Family Circus. So I had a lot of those. I didn't pretty funny. Funny, no, Kelly, there's, there's, there was one where funny. There is one where you see the the mom, the Family Circus mom, and she's looking away from this doorway, and she got a look of shock, and she's dropped the dishes like the dishes are falling off of a plate that she was holding. And then in the in the through the doorway, you see Jeffy coming out, and he says, Hey everybody, I want to show you my birthday suit. And he's wearing a suit like he's got a he's got a suit that he's gonna wear his birthday. But. She thinks birthday suit, as in what he was born in, that he walked out naked. That's funny. I can't tell if you're pranking me right now, the only thing less funny than Family Circus is listening to somebody explain. Well, you know, it was called Family Circle originally, and then they had to change it. But Calvin and Hobbes. What did you think of Calvin and Hobbes? I was never really into that. What about a lot of people were and the far side? Oh, the far side. The far side was so good. Well, we mentioned, you mentioned some of the tropes. We mentioned how those characters kind of a reflection of some of the neuroses that he had. So let's break down some of those. So Charlie Brown was all about kind of rejection and low self worth, low self esteem, right? Walking around like he like, just insecure, you know, just openly insecure about everything he was worried about everything right now, do you think that song by, I don't know if it was the coasters or the drifters, but Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown dude, he's a clown dude. That Charlie Brown. You know that one thinks so. Yeah, that was everybody always thinking, Oh, me. I don't think that had anything to do with it. But I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what song, what year that song came. I think that was a coincidence. It was a great song. Yeah, I don't think the the Venn diagram of of those two fans even intersect that much from back then. Hmm, okay, you know Charlie, I mean peanuts was a pretty white bread, Midwestern audience kind of comic strip, you know, what song would have been kind of revolutionary, like, I'm sure a lot of the peanuts fans weren't really into that. Yeah, I mean, I think it's talking about who calls the teacher Daddy O, and it's Charlie Brown. He that Charlie Brown, I guess had had some attitude this. Charlie Brown did not. He was just a kid running around, insecure of himself, but not in a way that a child would be insecure or even a teenager more like, more like an adult, an adult, right? These weren't teen angst, right? This wasn't this, and he wasn't even a teenager. He was he was a kid. He was in touch with his feelings way more than most kids were. So he was substituting for an adult that felt that way, right? What do you think about him always trying to kick the football? Well, you know, they asked when Sparky got sick, he had cancer, and when, when he got sick, they asked him, you know when, and he said he was going to hang it up. In fact, his lat, the last one, was released the day after he died. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. But they asked him, will Charlie finally kick the football? And he said, No, no, that would be a terrible thing to do to him. Like that would be, you know, kind of against type. But then later on, and is at the very, very end, he says, You know, I think it was cruel what I did by not letting him actually get a shot at the at the football. Oh, wow, Linus. Remember, Linus was really smart, yeah, yeah. He would, he would give these sort of soliloquies or speeches about things that were like in the Christmas special, you know, he sure told the whole story of of of the North Star and the three kings and the baby Jesus and all that stuff. Yeah, yeah. In fact, that whole, this whole success of that show was kind of odd, that these had these long, like Bible verses, and it was really, like melancholy, kind of sad, and had a jazz soundtrack, right, right? Who would have ever predicted that that would have made it and it was all Sparky. It was all his idea, right? If you ran that through a focus group or a bunch of studio executives, they would have lots of notes about those things, and it wouldn't end up looking like it did, but he just was gonna put out. What he put out, you know, Can you name the jazz group that played? Yeah, the Vince geraldi. Geraldi, yeah. And Vince geraldi was a friend of his that and it was kind of randomly chose him, like it was not a famous jazz musician. It was a buddy is, well, the the peanuts theme is amazing, right? It is, it's, it's one of my favorite pieces of music ever, sure. Well, you know, so, so back to Linus. He was, like, really intellectual and smart, but he had this crippling anxiety, right? He was, he was, he was probably more anxious than Charlie Brown was. These kids are running around with all these different like, I say, Lucy was kind of a very, you'd call it back then, bossy. Yeah, right, yeah, some of that stuff maybe doesn't hold up so well. But she was also aggressive. She was, like, an aggressive woman. Person, she was probably aggressively overcompensating, right? For her, maybe, maybe she shouldn't have been as secure as she was. Snoopy, they say, was kind of represented escapist fantasy, right? You know, like Snoopy was the only one that didn't have insecurities, but he also was kind of like not real, right? Like he was, he was very confident and and definitely his little daydreams about being the Red Baron or, you know, his, a lot of times the comic strip would just be about some little game he was playing with Woodstock or with himself, you know, right, right? And his adventures always seemed kind of independent of all the other kids. They didn't really accept what? Except for Charlie Brown, nobody really seemed to know that Snoopy was like a anthropomorphic Right, right? Then you've got pig pen, pig pen, pig pen. That's a really big one in terms of that was outward shame, right? He represented outward shame. This he was literally, you could see his he was wearing his stigma, right? Somebody that carried that around with him. Um, Sparky said about him, he's a human soil bank who raises a cloud of dust on a perfectly Green Clean Street, and passes out gumdrops that are invariably black. But you know, he leaned into it his stigma. He said, I'm proud of these dust particles. They've been around for centuries. He knows he's being laughed at every time you heard him speak, he actually was pretty intelligent and pretty well spoken. You know, it he didn't, he didn't talk like the sort of slack jaw you expected him to be. No, he said he's he knows he's being laughed at, judged uninvited, but he plays along because he's given up trying to be accepted. That's a pretty advanced theme, right? Yeah, to be walking around with like, the reason that everybody can see the reason that you're not accepted on you, right? Did he have a real name? I don't think so. I don't think so. Like, like his name was actually pig pen, and then he had Schroeder. Yeah, Schroeder's neurosis was obsessive fixation, right? Like, he was just a perfectionist, and he had to get he was the one that played the piano. Yeah, Lucy had a crush on him, but he was totally oblivious to that. He was, like, so inwardly focused and, like, obsessed with with certain things, right? These characters had deep issues. Yeah, I just think that's kind of interesting, like, I'd never really thought about until I prepared for for this. And I was like, Well, I just always thought was this kind of unfunny strip, but the fact that it made such a iconic presence in the in the 20th century must have, must have been doing something, right? Well, maybe they were relatable. You know, when it came down to it, you could people could relate to the characters. You know his, his Hollywood star, his Walk of Fame star is right next to Walt, Disney. Oh, I did not know that. Did you know that the Apollo 10 command module was named Charlie Brown? I did know that yes and that the lunar module was named Snoopy. Yes, yes, I do recall that. So he had, he Sparky also had, you know, I mentioned he had these insecurities. He'd say things like, I'm not a great cartoonist, and I'm not a great artist, I'm not a great writer, I'm just good at what I do. And they asked him if he was Charlie Brown. He said, I'm not Charlie Brown. I'm all of them. He talked openly about feeling creatively inadequate, not happy. So the only time he was ever happy was when he was writing the writing it, drawing it. Other than that, he was never happy. He referred to each blank. He said that, you know, looking at that blank piece of paper every day was a new chance to fail. This guy that did 18,000 of these, he looked at every one of them as a new chance to fail. And he's bringing in 30, 40 million a year of his own money, you know, billion, a billion dollars a year and you still ceiling, seeing that as an opportunity to fail. That's kind of like every new episode of dirt nap city for us, right? Yes, yes. That's how I feel. I see that blank, blank, blank, blank canvas. He said, sometimes I lie awake at night and I think, what have I done wrong? And then a voice says to me, this is going to take more than one night. Oh, that sounds like it comes right out of the Linus. Yeah. Linus is insecurities, right? Yeah. So I read that in 2006 he was the third highest earning dead celebrity. Okay, we haven't done this in a while. We did this early on. Yeah, yeah. I checked the 2024, list of highest earning dead celebrities. All right, so is he in the top 10? He is, he is number um eight, number eight. Okay, so this is from last year. He's number eight. And besides him, there are only three others that have. We've done episodes on and and, and besides him and one other guy, like seven of them are rock stars. Ah, okay, well, Walt Disney, of course. Nope, no, nope. Now remember, this would be the estate. I think the way they calculate this is like the estate has this much money. So this, usually, this is people doing being smart, with investors catalog, oh yeah, their intellectual property, yeah. So maybe Walt Disney, maybe they sold, maybe they cashed out long time ago and they're not still earning money. You don't know, yeah, I guess, like that is different than the Walt Disney Company, right? Right? You're talking about the actual individual person's estate, right? Well, who are the others? So no, let's go backwards from number 10. Number 10 is one that we did on dirt nap city. John Lennon, okay, okay, the estate of you know, pretty remarkable, though, that he died, what? 60 years ago? 45 years ago? Yeah, yeah. Four died in 1980 Oh, right, right, right. But in 15 years, you'll be able to look at this, listen to that, right? Then 60 will be spot on, right? Yeah. 45 years ago, number nine is Matthew Perry. How is that even possible? Friends brings in so much money? Wow. And it probably just all still goes to his, you know, just the syndicated rights. And what is it on? I don't know if it's on max or Netflix, or whatever it is. It brings the money, but pretty amazing. And now this isn't, this isn't since they've died, this is in 2024 how much they made? How much did, how much did Matthew Perry's estate make in 2024 did it say? See, does it actually have a number$18 million Wow, just for doing nothing, just for being who it is, and invested in stuff? Yeah. Number eight is Sparky. Number seven, Bob Marley, okay. Number six. Prints, Okay, number five, somebody who isn't in the same in terms of, in terms of its catalog, not the same category as Prince or some of these, but invested wisely or sold at the right time. Rico Kasich from the cars, hmm, okay. Kind of a weird like, if you look at this list, he's kind of the one that doesn't look like he belongs. And maybe Matthew, not as much of a house household name, at least maybe for for you and I, it is, but for most people, I don't think Rick o'casick is, is a very household name, very recognizable, no lead singer of the cars, of course,$45 million Wow died in 2019 he had a deal with primary wave, which is a publishing company that he sold his name, image and likeness to, just what I needed was named one of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. He sold 20 million records. But still, I don't think that's a name that we could have sat here all day and not come up with that name, right? Agreed, agreed, especially when you consider that. Number four is Elvis, wow, yeah, I don't, I don't consider them in the same category, although, but okay. Number three, Dr Seuss, okay. Number two, Freddie Mercury, Oh, wow. Okay, and number one, making $500 million $600 million in 2024 the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. Ah, yeah, of course. 600 million Wow. That's just in, in not even producing new content. Also owned. Owns Beatles catalog. I think too, right? That was a wise investment. Yeah, no kidding. They they have a they're touring. They're making a musical of Michael Jackson in in Hamburg, Germany, they're going to open it. Well, I think it's out now, yeah, I think it's out now, but it pulls in like $6 million a week, no, so that's going to add to that bottom line. Yeah, it's crazy. But yeah. Charles M Schultz, i. Sparky Schultz, all right, man. Well, I'm glad to share some Snoopy Snoopy tales with you. Snoop it out. Oh, Sparky space. They call him Sparky since he was a boy, drew in the margins. Found his own joy in a world of lines and ink. He can fight a quiet dream with nowhere to hide. The little red haired girl danced in his mind. A love had spoken, a heart undefined. He sketched a smile, but never said a word in his comic world, her laugh was hurt. Oh. Oh, Sparky spent coarse skies in the night. With every stroke he chased thigh in a world of fame, His heart stayed true to the Love and Dreams. Slowly he knew the years rolled by. His comics took flight, a household name under every light, but deep inside the boy still remain longing for love, untouched by fame. Sparky, the artist, rich yet shy, wrote his soul with a gentle sigh. In every panel, in every frame, lived the heart of a man who never changes. Oh, sparkies pink are skies in the night with every stroke he chased the his heart stayed true to Love and Dreams only he knew he